Friends
Peace be with you.
There’s a saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, though Francis’ scholars cannot find it anywhere in his writings, that says “Preach the gospel always and when necessary use words.” It implies that we should live the gospel message and only use words when we absolutely have to, almost as though there’s something wrong with using words. On the one hand, I see the value. A person who preaches about Jesus but doesn’t live his or her own life in a way that exemplifies the gospel message is a hypocrite. On the other hand, I think it unnecessarily hamstrings Christians in a time that, more than ever, we can’t just expect that people will notice how we live our lives and, thereby, be attracted to salvation in the church of Jesus Christ, that is the Catholic Church.
Each of our readings has a pretty clear example of this message and, I think, builds a challenge for us. Let’s start with the second reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the passage we read, St. Paul emphasizes two interconnected concepts that are integral to Christian living. He says, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” Scripture scholars call this a chiastic structure, meaning that St. Paul states something and then repeats it in reverse in order to emphasize the middle point. So, belief is what St. Paul is trying to emphasize but confessing is the way the belief is lived out. In other words, we are called to have faith in the saving acts of Jesus Christ but we are also called to confess it to others. The way St. Paul is using the word confess is, obviously, not in the sense of what we do in the confessional but in the sense of speaking spiritual truths. St. Augustine wrote a great book called the Confessions which remains one of the greatest explanations of the Catholic Faith ever written. Part of having faith means confessing that faith to others. It’s not just about doing good deeds but also about reminding ourselves and telling others why we do them.
Some will counter that, by telling others why we do good things, it’s a form of bragging. I see the point, however I would say there’s a way that we should confess our faith that is anything but bragging. The way we do that is by modeling our confession on the confession of Jesus. The desert for Jesus is not a place of escape. Jesus knows that he is going into the desert to be tempted by the devil. A national speaker and founder of the group Acts 23 named Fr. John Riccardo, recently presented to me at a conference that the reason Jesus went into the desert is to make sure his disguise is working. Had the second person of the trinity come in all his power and majesty to defeat the devil, the devil would have left him alone because he would have realized he’s out of his league. However, by becoming fully human while remaining fully God, the second person of the trinity is going into the desert to make sure the devil will treat him the same way the devil treats us, trying to get him to abandon his faith and become like a “small g” god. Jesus wants to make sure the devil hasn’t figured out that, by dying on the cross and fulfilling the punishment Adam deserved, that by eating from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil he would die, Jesus alone could remove death as a punishment and open the way for eternal life human beings. So Jesus goes into the desert to be tempted. I’d caution people that this isn’t Jesus’ way of saying that we need to set ourselves up to be deliberately tempted by the devil or to confront the devil. In fact, I’d say we need to do everything we can to avoid having experiences with ouija boards, seances, freemasonry, palm readers, mediums, psychics and other things and people that purport to expose us to the so-called spirit world but are really opening us up to a world that we and they are unprepared to deal with, the realm of the devil and evil spirits. So, don’t think Jesus is telling us to play with fire here. He is uniquely qualified to be tempted because he is the second person of the Holy Trinity and because he is filled with the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and because it’s all part of the loving plan of his heavenly Father, the first person of the Holy Trinity.
I think one of the reasons we don’t confess our faith, is because we fear being called a hypocrite or we fear not knowing what to say. On the one hand, no one is perfect other than Jesus and, because of her unique role in duping the devil, his mother Mary. We are all striving to be perfect but, ultimately remain imperfect. That’s why confession means, not only telling someone what we believe but also telling a priest when we don’t live up to the standards God has for us. But, on the other hand, if we wait until we are perfect before we talk about Jesus, we’ll never do it. So, we have to talk about Him and, if we feel like we’re not ready to do so, we can model Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to put the right words in our mouth. It’s not a replacement for studying the faith but we also can’t anticipate every question a person is going to ask so we have to rely on the Holy Spirit’s help. Come Holy Spirit! Teach us to pray. Teach us to confess our faith.
Lastly, looking at the first reading, one of the things Moses teaches the Israelites in Deuteronomy, the second book of the Bible, a book that can be really challenging to read because it tends to get bogged down in legislation, is that they need to have something basic prepared about why they believe what they believe. In other words, if someone were to ask you why you were a Catholic, why you waste an hour of your free time on the weekend coming to some outdated religious service with priests who are so out of touch with society that they can’t get married and are always asking you for money, what would you say? Could you do it in a three minute response to a friend? A one minute response on the bus? A thirty second response to a Jehovah’s witness door knocker? A 15 second video on TikTok or Instagram or Youtube shorts? This is a skill that takes some prayer and practice and I hope lent is a good time to ask the Holy Spirit to inspire you with an answer. How is God calling us to confess our faith with our lips?
